Poets

Eula Biss

Eula Biss is the author of The Balloonists (Hanging Loose Press, 2002), as well as the award-winning nonfiction books On Immunity: An Inoculation (Graywolf Press, 2014) and Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays (Graywolf Press, 2009). She is the recipient of a Jaffe Writers’ Award, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches at Northwestern University and lives in Chicago.

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Lesson Plans

By This Poet

My father told us stories every night about strange little ani-
mals that came out in the dark. When my father was away, my
mother read us fairy tales that always ended in marriage.
Sometimes, when I missed my father, I slept under my bed in
mourning and the mice crawled all around me.
*
I stand at the window of a bridal shop where huge dresses
hang ghostly in the dark. At the back is a collection of veils
like a row of sleeping jellyfish. One whole wall of the shop is
a mass of white cloth. The wedding dresses are enormous.
They are twice as big as me, and bigger than any woman on
the street.
*

This is the year that everyone is trying to fly around the world in a balloon. I don't know why.